What Benefits of Green Tea You Should Know for Healthy Hair

Photo: Flickr user Philippine

Green tea is known worldwide for its health benefits, not excepting your hair health as well. So this time let’s see what those benefits are and how they can help for your hair.

Stimulates your Hair Follicles

The green tea has antioxidants that stimulate dermal papilla cells to make your hair grow faster. This drink increases your metabolism that is responsible for hair growth rate.

Stronger Hair

This tea is a great source of vitamin C, vitamin E and panthenol that is used in conditioners and shampoos to make stronger and softer your hair and reduce split ends. The vitamin C prevents against UV damage while vitamin E restore damaged and dry hair. Choose hair products that contain only real green tea extract or EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate).

Potential Re-growth

The experiment with mice shows that polyphenol contained in green tea may help to re-grow the hair. During six months of experiment 33% of mice who got polyphenol extract in their drinking water had significant hair re-growth compared with the group who didn’t. There are many shampoos with green tea extract that help to fight alopecia. Or simply don’t forget your cup of tea daily. Drinking 3 cups of tea daily and applying the green tea extract on the affected area 2 times daily may help you to re-growth your hair.

Relieve Dandruff and Psoriasis

Green tea has great benefits for treatment of dandruff and excess scalp flaking. This tea exfoliates the dry flakes that are result of dandruff. The shampoo with green tea extract or green tea rinsing after shampooing may reduce scalp irritation. Choose the shampoo in which green tea is close to the top of the ingredients and doesn’t enclose any harmful chemicals such as sodium lauryl sulfate or parabens that can cause scalp irritation.

I had luck to find a great conditioner which doesn’t contain any harmful ingredients, only organics. This is WEN® Spring Gardenia Green Tea Cleansing Conditioner. It’s a pity but they don’t have shampoo of this line, or maybe I just can’t find it. Otherwise I give the priority for conditioner or other hair products used after shampooing. The conditioner is used after shampooing to eliminate the remainders of shampoo and develop the protective layer. So maybe it is enough to have only good conditioner.

How to Get Optimal Results for Your Hair

There are many different ways how to take green tea. You can drink it, take green tea extract supplements or use it topically. Also there are lots of shampoos but its effect is quite weak because you wash it out. The better and quicker results you can get from extract supplements or use it topically in a strong dose.

Try this strong homemade green tea hair mask:

6 bags of green tea

¼ cup almond, olive, or other oil

Put both ingredients into small saucepan and bring to boil. Simmer for about half an hour or until oil turns green. Cool it and rub the mixture into your scalp and hair. Leave it for another half an hour or more, the longer the better. Then wash it with shampoo as normally. You can pour a little bit green tea to your shampoo for prevention as well.